For those who have used TIC-80 or PICO-8 to introduce their young (e.g 7yo) kid to programming by modifying games, what games did you start with? And any other tips?
I used a platformer game with levels, I dont remember its name, but the levels were very difficult, and at some point when my daughter was very frustrated I showed her how to edit the level variable and skip to the next level, and also how to modify the map.
My daughter is 12, so things are different, but we didnt go much further than that with pico8. We moved to python then arduino/microbit/etc and then to c and now to riscv assembler, and will circle back to python in a year or so.
When she was 7-8 we spent more time with physical things, arduinos and etc (clap and light turns on kind of things) like this one: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EVXavpNGYEc
That looks seriously cool. Just the colors give me goosebumps :)
completely offtopic:
My dream is to build a super cheap child friendly computer, that the kids can build themselves, has a software keyboard that directly polls the gpio pins so that kids can modify their keyboard instead of having a keyboard controller (just so there is less mistery in what happens when a key is pressed). And the OS is something inspired from LEAP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c that allowing you to evaluate code and apply it to your current file. A bit like your LOAD81 but with text.
Wow. I opened the triangle demo and I felt like I was transported back in time to when I had an Acorn Electron and would type in BASIC programs from listings in magazines.
I was about 10 then. I hope my son (7yo) starts to find this stuff interesting soon.
We did two games by following tutorials on youtube. Platformer tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6c6DvGK4lg&list=PLyhkEEoUjS... and also a top down adventure game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1wvvbVQ5zo
My daughter is 12, so things are different, but we didnt go much further than that with pico8. We moved to python then arduino/microbit/etc and then to c and now to riscv assembler, and will circle back to python in a year or so.
When she was 7-8 we spent more time with physical things, arduinos and etc (clap and light turns on kind of things) like this one: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EVXavpNGYEc